Friday Memes: The In Crowd by Charlotte Vassell

 Happy Friday!

Book Beginnings is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader. She asks that the first sentence is posted along with the author and title of the book and the reader's initial thoughts on the sentence, the book, or anything else it inspires. 

Carrie at Reading Is My Superpower.org also provides a linky for sharing first lines and connecting with others. This meme asks that the chosen books be PG or marked as Mature if they are not. 

The Friday 56 was hosted by Freda at Freda's Voice. This meme is currently on hiatus but many of us are still including a sentence from page 56 or from 56% of the ebook. Anne @ Head Full of Books is picking up the slack until Freda is ready to return. I think this link will get you to the correct place. 

Beginning:

Eight men with respectable professions and long vowels. Eight men wearing Lycra all-in-ones with stripes down the side that match the blades of their oars and their boat club's badge. Their striped blazers match too. Matchy, matchy, even though the colors clash.

Friday 56:

"Do you know of anyone then who drove a red Jaguar convertible?"

"A Jaguar?" Simpson-Bamber leaned forward. "Why do you ask?"

This week I am spotlighting The In Crowd by Charlotte Vassell. This one is from my Review stack and is the second in the Detective Inspector Caius Beachamp mystery series. Here is the description from Amazon:

From the celebrated author of The Other Half comes a fabulous whodunit about two cold cases in which things go missing: a fourteen-year-old girl and a multi-million-dollar pension fund.

Early one morning, a men’s rowing team discovers a body floating face down in the Thames. Many years before, the chief executive of a clothing manufacturer walked off with a multi-million dollar corporate retirement fund and disappeared without a trace. Now, the discovery of this body has reopened that cold case.

Meanwhile, Detective Inspector Caius Beauchamp has his own evening at the theater upended by the discovery of a dead body just a few seats away. Two decades ago, Eliza Chapel, a fourteen-year-old student at a girls boarding school in Cornwall, disappeared in the middle of the night under dubious circumstances. A second body and a second cold case reopened.

As DI Caius Beauchamp—along with his associates Matt Chung and Amy Noakes—investigates these parallel missing persons cases, he finds himself ensnared in the unexpected political machinations of a duke-in-waiting. This is yet another masterful mystery from Charlotte Vassell that is every bit as pointed as it is poignant.